- Nov 2020
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courses.commarts.wisc.edu courses.commarts.wisc.edu
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participation
As Paul Graham lays out in his article, Web 2.0, when referring to the second incarnation of the term 'Web 2.0,' "the second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy" (Graham, 2005). 4chan is nothing if not democratic, and as such, it fulfills a major component of the term Web 2.0 with its vast (sometimes nearly anarchic) levels of democracy. The other two components are fulfilled regarding 4chan as well, since its website uses javascript, and it does well, "not to maltreat users," (Graham, 2005). As Caitlin Dewey says, "participants can say and do virtually anything they want with only the most remote threat of accountability," (Dewey, 2014). With its fulfillment of these components, 4chan is a shining example of Web 2.0 because it wouldn't be possible without javascript, it's HIGHLY democratic, and it would take supremely drastic action to be "mistreated" by the site.
Works Cited:
Graham, P. (2005). Web 2.0. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
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fallen through the looking glass
https://media.giphy.com/media/4BgQaxfQfeqys/giphy.gif
Work Cited:
Alice In Wonderland Disney GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY. Retrieved 8 November 2020, from https://media.giphy.com/media/4BgQaxfQfeqys/giphy.gif
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Beran credits his narrow miss to his father’s experience with Nazis during World War II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoNln78HGN8
Much like Jez and Mark's realization regarding WW2 in Peep Show, which is surprisingly analogous to what Ellis is talking about here. If others on radicalizing websites like 4chan considered their actions as potentially making them "baddies," they might avoid the types of fates Ellis claims she and Beran skirted.
Work Cited:
JOEL. (2018). Are We The Baddies? [Video]. YouTube.
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They feel isolated and powerless because they are. There’s a reason its most fervent users are teenagers, NEETS (that’s “Not in Education, Employment, or Training”), or both. In some cases, that distance has driven them to extremism, but it’s also made them uniquely able to reflect the world back at the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzcKJVtgaNA
Work Cited:
Soldier_66. (2018). Why are we still here? Just to suffer? {Original scene} [Video]. YouTube.
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weekly headline fodder
In addition to being called, "The Internet's own bogeyman," (Dewey, 2014) or even just "Something Awful" by Dale Beran in the title of his book (a permanent headline) about the site, 4chan also made the news in Alexis Madigal's article, Google and Facebook Have Failed Us when he chastised Google's handling of its "top stories" algorithm in response to the Las Vegas shooting, in 2017. (Madrigal, 2017) Madrigal's contention is that Google mistakenly showed its users 4chan posts toward the top of its "top stories" results, despite the fact that, "4chan is a known source of not just racism, but hoaxes and deliberate misinformation," (Madrigal, 2017) and he also notes that "In any list a human might make of sites to exclude from being labeled as 'news,' 4chan would be near the very top" (Madrigal, 2017). As the internet's bogeyman, 4chan is constantly under fire, as Ellis notes, but Madrigal clearly makes a valid point because, much like Paul Graham notes of Reddit in his article, Web 2.0, many a layperson may go to online forums for their news, like Graham himself says, "I never look at any news site now except Reddit," (Graham, 2005) and Google's mistake of legitimizing 4chan as news near the top of Google's search results may have sent many vulnerable minds down a radicalization rabbit hole.
Works Cited:
Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
Graham, P. (2005). Web 2.0. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
Madrigal, A. (2017). Google and Facebook Have Failed Us. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/google-and-facebook-have-failed-us/541794/
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rickrolling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
While Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," has existed since the 1980s, it was user-generated-content spawned from 4chan that linked the song to the bait-and-switch practice of surprising unsuspecting internet users with it after being promised something else (Dewey, 2014).
Works Cited:
Official Rick Astley. (2009). Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Video) [Video]. YouTube.
Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
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The trouble, Beran argues, is that it’s not a joke anyone else gets. Or even a joke at all. “There’s no word for a farce of a farce.
https://youtu.be/mQJPI9_TVHA?t=62
I reference Todd Phillips' Joker here purposefully. The parallels of the people Ellis writes of in this quote and the audience of Joker that personally identify with its main character Arthur Fleck have a fair bit of overlap. The movie's portrayal of Fleck and Ellis' citation of Beran's summation of 4chan users as multi-layered post-truth proponents of irony both reject society and its conceptions of fairness and morality.
Work Cited:
Movieclips. (2020). Joker (2019) - My Life Is a Comedy Scene (5/9) | Movieclips [Video]. Hollywood.
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As Beran explains, many Gen Xers and millennials, raised to expect boomer-era prosperity, instead found themselves scuttled by the Great Recession: jobless or doomed to 1099-R subcontracting gigs, drowning in debt, unable to make real-world romantic attachments, slowly realizing that the future they’d been promised was canceled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGRhd_iWuE&feature=emb_title
Work Cited:
Ryuujin131. (2010). Matsuoka Shuzo [松岡修造 ] - あきらめかけているあなた (NEVER GIVE UP!!) [English] [Video]. YouTube.
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where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented
While 4chan has developed a mostly negative public perception for itself, with the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey even calling it "the Internet's own bogeyman," it also has brought attention to User-Generated-Content as beloved as Rickrolling and Chocolate Rain (Dewey, 2014). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA
Works Cited:
Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
TayZonday. (2007). "Chocolate Rain" Original Song by Tay Zonday [Video]. YouTube.
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anonymous users
The anonymous nature of discourse on 4chan is reminiscent of its (now discontinued) anonymous peer Yik Yak, which, until 2017, allowed for its users within a 10-mile radius to communicate with each other namelessly. Yik Yak, like 4chan, often degenerated into racist rhetoric, and according to Alex from the Reply All podcast, on college campuses it often, "became a screen onto which the student body's ugliest, and most violent thoughts were projected, for everyone to see" ("#46 Yik Yak Returns", 2015).
4chan has often become no less ugly or violent, and as Vice.com's Rob Arthur notes, much like on Yik Yak, "Violent threats against minorities have also proliferated on the anonymous message board," (Arthur, 2019). The difference between the two mediums, however, is the scale. While Yik Yak limited individuals' correspondence to within a 10-mile radius, 4chan is a global entity, with much more room for large-scale piling on and profligacy. Beran in his book even goes so far as to ascribe the causation of Donald Trump's ascension to the Presidency to the reach of 4chan.
Works Cited: #46 Yik Yak Returns. (2015). [Podcast]. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjer
Arthur, R. (2019). We Analyzed More Than 1 Million Comments on 4chan. Hate Speech There Has Spiked by 40% Since 2015. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3nbzy/we-analyzed-more-than-1-million-comments-on-4chan-hate-speech-there-has-spiked-by-40-since-2015
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forum itself
As Caitlin Dewey, of the Washington Post, summarizes Lee Knutilla, of York University in Canada's work, she explains 4chan's role online as "the philosophical anthithesis to virtually every other mainstream social property," (Dewey, 2014) in that its goal is to fly in the face of, "social media's increasing push to persistent identity online" (Knutilla, 2011). This makes 4chan's role in online discourse unique because of its 22 million (as of 2014) unique monthly users (Dewey, 2014) that congregate to form a formidable force online that exists outside of societal norms of increased online identification.
Beran in his book, It Came From Something Awful, even credits the formidability of this online congregation with deciding America's 45th president, when he calls them a, "toxic troll army," that, "Memed Donald Trump into Office," on the cover of his book.
Works Cited:
Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
Knutilla, L. (2011). View of User unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency | First Monday. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3665/3055
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anonymous imageboard
4chan is reasonably unique in the current online landscape, in that it permits conversation by totally anonymous users. This allows its users to post without much thought about their privacy status, which they often take for granted. This unique level of privacy fostered by anonymity, in a way, partially delivers on the Cyberspace rhetoric of the 1990s in that people can't be judged by their physical identities unless they offer identifying information up themselves. That's not to say that 4chan is a welcoming space for all (or even most) users, though, as it has been acknowledged, even later here in Ellis' article, that 4chan houses plenty of white supremacist tendencies, but, strictly speaking, as far as one's ideas go, they are judged purely based on their merit so long as no additional personal identifiers are offered. As Dillon Ludemann notes in his paper, /pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan, white supremacy, as well as other, "practiced and perceived deviancy is due to the default blanket of anonymity, and the general discourse of the website encourages users to remain unnamed. This is further enforced and embodied as named users, colloquially known as 'namefags,' are often vilified for their separation from the anonymous collective community" (Ludemann, 2018).
Hypothetically, since all users start out as anonymous, one could also present their identity however they so please on the platform, and in theory what this means is that the technology behind the site promotes identity exploration (and thus cyberspace rhetoric), even though in practice, what most users experience is latent racism that depends on users' purposefully offered identifying information or generalized white supremacist posts that are broadcasted for all on the site to see.
Work Cited:
Ludemann, D. (2018). /pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan. Discourse, Context & Media, 24, 92-98. doi: 10.1016/j.dcm.2018.01.010
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furious nihilism
This is an interesting, yet dubious concept. Can Nihilism truly be furious since it requires a fundamental rejection of the notion that things matter, and if things don't matter then why would fury be required in any form? As a non-user, I wonder if this is a mischaracterization, especially since I'm not sure if the combination of terms is possible.
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aggrandizing
Very important to note that Ellis acknowledges Dale Beran's perspective with his book, It Came From Something Awful, is aggrandizing, this means that she is intentionally shifting away from the Technologically Deterministic argument that the technology of 4chan is what gave the U.S. Donald Trump as President. She's definitely, with this single word, displaying a preference towards the Instrumentalism end of the Technological Determinism vs Instrumentalism debate, whereas Beran's very premise, "How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office," is inherently Deterministic.
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